My Favorite Books of 2024

"By the age of 70, he who doesn’t read will have lived only one life. He who reads will have lived 5000 years. Reading is immortality backwards."

— Umberto Eco

For me, reading and writing are deeply intertwined and are both driven by the same longing: to reach into the depths of my own life and enrich the act of living. I read not merely to learn but to traverse new worlds and rediscover long-forgotten truths that bring fire to my inner life.

Reading great books has always been my refuge from the dreadful bewailing of the modern world. “It is a most wonderful comfort,” wrote a Buddhist monk from the 1300s, “to sit alone beneath a lamp, book spread before you, and commune with someone from the past whom you have never met.”

For whatever reason, books hold a quiet, profound power to shelter us, provoke us, and, most of all, draw us closer to the essence of what it means to be human.

I have to admit, as you all probably know, I’m partial to older books and dead writers. So much of what is written today feels hollow and tepid compared to the writers of the last two centuries.

In the words of one journalist: “When you internalize an author whose vision or philosophy is both rich and out of fashion, you gain a certain immunity from the pressures of the contemporary. The modern world, with its fads, propaganda, and advertising, is forever trying to herd us into conformity. Great literature can help us to remain fad-proof.”

So once again, I found myself retreating to the trusted treasures of the past, works that have weathered time, and the shifting winds of moral fashion.

However, some of the few newer books I read this year did reveal genuine substance—works I know I’ll turn back to in the years ahead.

In the words of the great Romanian philosopher Emil Cioran, “Read day and night, devour books. Through books you can retrace your way back to the origins of spleen, discarding history and its illusions.”

Today, I’m sharing my favorite reads of 2024.